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Sunday, January 24, 2016

A few weeks back, I answered a query on Quora about the software quality assurance profession.
It became one of the mostly viewed posts in SQA topic and noticed a lot of upvotes recently.
Hence, thought to share this here for the readers of my blog.

Let me try to answer with respect to my career as a software quality assurance engineer for 12 years.

I was unable to pursue bachelor degree with computer science as a major. But I badly wanted to join software industry for whatever position which someone could offer me. Back in 2003, I, with another set of my university batch mates were interviewed by a software services provider for a position called, "Associate software quality assurance engineer". I had no idea what software quality assurance means. Read two chapters in software engineering books by Ian Somerville and Roger Pressman. That was the only knowledge that I had about software quality assurance when I faced my first interview. I was able to get through the interview and landed in my first job.Within the first few weeks of my career, I realized that having end-to-end understanding of software is the key to test it effectively. I spent long hours learning the software that I was asked to test. Eventually, I was able to uncover many critical bugs based on my understanding of the software as well as its eco-system. That helped me to build the trust on fellow team mates including PMs, SDEs etc..I advanced in my career simply due to my approach towards testing. In a few years, I switched companies and lead a QA team in open-source enterprise middleware provider, WSO2. The mere testability of middleware had been a challenge but I was able to research and find interesting approaches to make untestable software testable and fill bug tracking systems with hundreds of real bugs.With this, I was able to earn the trust of fellow engineers and I felt that I was adding value to the team. I was flexible and context-driven for project needs. Never adhered to process standards taught in some software QA certifications but spent time on learning new trends, technologies specific to my domain.I still spend my time on reading whatever specific to QA and share my learnings through my blog. With my passion and attitude towards software quality assurance, I realized that I would move forward and explore more on how software is built and tested in top tech companies. My attempt on exploring was successful.Nearly 1.5 years back, I was contacted by Amazon for a software quality assurance engineer position. I decided to take the opportunity and proceeded with amazon. I was offered software quality assurance engineer position after an extremely tough interview process. I quickly adapted to the environment but did not change my approach towards testing. I started at amazon with spending long hours learning the applications that I was assigned to test. I mastered the applications as well as all services that made up the system. That way, I was able to uncover critical bugs, help to deliver software quickly, which eventually made me a key contributor of the team.Software quality assurance has never been a boring job for me. In some web applications which involve rich UI interactions with repetitive UI clicks through multiple pages, I made testing interesting by covering all business logic testing at the web services level. When feature designs are complete, I start test strategy and plan. I never act as quality police or a gatekeeper who merely control software releases at the end of cycle. I collaborate with developers, understand the changes/implementation and build my test strategy accordingly. This way, I reduce time which spent unnecessarily on regression. I trust test automation pyramid and focus on automating more on service layer instead of brittle/unmaintainable UI. I admire great testers/autohrs of our era such as Elisabeth Hendrickson, James Bach, Michael Bolton etc and adjust my approaches based on their great suggestions.Thus, software quality assurance has been an AWESOME career for me. I was appreciated, recognized, paid well and promoted based on my contributions as a software quality assurance engineer.My advice is, software quality assurance is a great career. But you should follow simple set of principles to become successful as a QAE. In my experience, those are

Enthusiasm in learning new business domains, technologies

Passion and commitment

Flexibility

Team working

Ownership

Similarly, QA can become boring, easily replaceable, mundane job if you build your careers based on the followings

Enforcing old school policies on engineering teams that make faster deliveries impossible. This will make you the sole "approver" of software and the job will become hectic.

Not investing time on reducing repetitive manual testing overhead

Considering software as a complete black-box in testing and not focusing on how everything is connected together

Adhering to principles that you learned in software testing certifications without adjusting your approach based on project context

Web Services Testing with soapUI

About Charitha

Charitha Kankanamge possesses over 14 years of experience in various technological domains including software testing/QA and middleware technical support. Currently, he works as a Software Quality Assurance Manager at Amazon. Previously, he worked for an open source software company, WSO2 as Senior Manager, Technical Support. He is also a committer of the Apache Software Foundation. Charitha's strengths and key experiences include functional testing, SOA testing, test planning and agile/exploratory test mechanisms.